Not familiar with potlikker? Well we're a bit obsessed with the smoky liquid that's left behind after boiling greens. Don't you dare throw it away because, as every true Southerner knows, the stuff is liquid gold. Here it gets repurposed into a noodle dish that's chock full of ham and greens and is the perfect dish for the New Year. It's also a great way to use your leftover ham hock.

I hoard cookbooks and probably need an intervention. This is not a cry for help, as I will defend the stacks of Time-Life food series, spiral bound church annuals, massive encyclopedias, tattered copies of the Carolina Housewife and The Essential Cuisine of Michel Bras, as they represent some of the hundreds of titles I could never part with. You can have that copy of Robuchon: Cooking Through the Seasons when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.

The problem is that I am just too busy to really use all of them and revel in them like I used to. I remember buying a copy of Waverly Root’s The Food of France years ago and just sapping in every word, every regional story. Now I get a book and glance through it for some quick ideas and then up to the shelf it goes.

In the stacks is a book I bought used, for $1 from a shop up the road in Bishop, Georgia. It was published in 1970, and is title Vibration Cooking: or the travel notes of a geechee girlby Verta Mae Grosvenor. Like many things at my disposal I just needed some calling to go digging for it. I needed to be reminded that that book sat up there for a reason, that it was something that I had once wanted to become enmeshed in but somehow got
sidetracked with the regular routine.

The calling to find the book was spurred from a conversation with an old friend about Verta Mae. I am opening a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, in the spring and my friend and I were chatting about the cooks and food historians integral to the area. Vibration Cooking is almost a stream of consciousness cookbook written from the inimitable perspective of Verta Mae, a black woman in the '70s documenting the African American relevance in the shaping of American food, what food meant to her, how it affected her, how it enlightened her, and how you should cook it. It is a stunning read.

Seattle Slims Down Because of Its New Menus? Eateries in the Emerald City have cut down on calories, salt and saturated fat (a little bit) in their meals since they were required to post nutritional information on their menus, a new study finds.

Ribs have an enormous and cult-like following among this nation's outdoor cooking enthusiasts, but their biggest fans are the folks who follow the world of competitive barbecue. Even more than whole hog, which is sacred to true barbecue believers, ribs say "barbecue." I asked Myron Mixon,"the winningest man in barbecue" about why.

"I believe it's because ribs, like most of the best comfort foods, have built-in 'handles' and are just easy to hold and eat," he says. "Take corn dogs, hamburgers, pizza, chicken legs. They're simple to grip, and they taste so damn good. It's an irresistible combination."

Mixon should know: His St. Louis ribs, also called spareribs, which are long and come from the bottom belly and shoulder portion of the hog, nearly always win him money.

"I always cook these ribs in Kansas City Barbecue Society-sanctioned events because the judges like them," he explains. "They look for a perfect combination of texture (soft without being mushy), flavor (smoky, but with a sweet glaze), and appearance (shiny like new pennies)."

Probably more than most places, southern Louisiana is governed by tradition when it comes to meals. Down there, we eat red beans and rice on Mondays. Originally, at least the way I always heard it, it was because Monday was wash day, and that was a dish that needed no tending and cooked slowly while all that hard household work was going on. Also, because Monday follows Sunday, which was traditionally a ham dinner day, there were usually ham bones and ham bits available to toss in the pot for flavor.

My mother always had a fully automated laundry room, and never used a washboard in her life, as far as I know. But did we eat red beans and rice growing up in the 1970s and '80s? Yes, we did.

One of the things that made our food traditions so rich down south was the presence of African Americans doing so much of the cooking (and not coincidentally, the washing) in so many households. They weren't cooking chitlins' for the families they worked for, but they brought plenty of colorful flavorful soul foods to the table, and it was warmly welcomed. Where would we be with out gumbo? They were also often the keepers of traditional Crèole dishes, like étoufées.

We would have pork chops and spaghetti and meatballs mid-week, most weeks. My mother was fairly progressive, and made a mean rosemary chicken on a regular basis. Very rarely, if we begged her hard enough, she'd treat us to fried chicken.

Friday was fried fish day, and not just during Lent. In high school, I would usually arrange to spend the night at my friend Brad's on Friday's. His mother, Ms. Diana, came from Burroughs, Louisiana, a big fishing community with lots of citrus groves, where there's a large eastern European population. She's a fantastic cook--and man, what a baker--she'd turn out these piles of the most beautiful fried shrimp, all perfect. And fries. Talk about the key to a teenage boy's heart. That's not why I hung out with you, Brad. But here's to you, Ms. Diana!

In the last few weeks publishers looking for reviews have been sending me more and more books with the same theme: cooking local. Which is kind of overreaching, because what's local to Emeril is not going to be local to some cook in Minnesota or Arizona. So I was pretty happy to find this on my doormat the other day. It's local cooking, but it's meant to be transporting. You really get a sense of a unique place and how the food there evolved through the centuries.

The author, Joan E. Aller, is an artist with a home in the Appalachian Mountains and has made this pretty much a love letter with photos, history and resources. She's collected recipes from friends, neighbors and innkeepers for a great mix of down-home and swanky food: cowboy gravy and trout cakes with remoulade; fry bread and lemon-pepper popovers; old-fashioned root beer and grilled okra with pine nuts.

I was quite happy to see she included one of the best Southern indulgences, a dip I picked up back in the last century in Vidalia, Georgia: equal parts chopped sweet onion, grated cheese and mayonnaise baked for 25 minutes at 350. It's always a huge hit at parties. And I liked her bacon muffins not least for the thrifty aspect of bacon drippings as the fat in the batter. They would have been even better if I'd made the sweet onion butter she suggested to go with them.

You'd probably make back the price of the book just with the recipes in her "country store" chapter, for both fresh and canned pickles, spiced peaches, corncob jelly and, especially, flavored syrups (strawberry, pecan, blackberry and cinnamon), which have to be better than the junk from the supermarket.

Aller includes recipes for homemade wine, too, made from either fruit or from dandelions. They sell those at the Greenmarkets in New York, but I'd sooner attempt moonshine. Which, of course, she also covers.

A diner at a restaurant in northern Nigeria has discovered a piece of beef with the name of Allah on it, followed by the discovery of three more pieces of similarly "godly" meat in the kitchen. Now thousands are flocking to the eatery. A local says the fact that there were four pieces of meat, not just one, defies scientific explanation.

Of course, it's just the latest in a long series of sightings of religious figures and words in food or food-related items, something most experts ascribe to pareidolia, where people find significance in random or natural phenomena (think bunnies in clouds and Satanic messages in Beatles songs played backwards).

Let's take a trip through the past and revisit some of the more significant incidences of Jesus, the Virgin Mary or Allah deciding to pop up somewhere in people's lunches.

After a much-publicized but disappointing fund-raiser last Thursday, founder Kenneth Willhoite says that there may not be enough cash on hand to make another month's rent, meaning it's possible, even likely, that this unique homage to African-American culinary culture won't make it past its fourth month.